Start: Clarksdale, Mississippi
End: Independence, Kansas
States: Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas
Road Kill Count: 12 armadillos, 8 raccoons, 2 cats, 1 dog, 1 deer, 1 watermelon
The part was over this morning when we rose early to get back on the road. We had almost eight hours total driving to get done, crossing all of Arkansas diagonally. We got a little turned around leaving Clarksdale because there is apparently a GPS void hanging over it. One would think leaving at 8 AM on A Sunday morning would guarantee a quiet departure, not really. While heading out on the road that connects to highway 61 we see two cop cars parked on either side of the road and two police officers in the middle of the street. They were talking to the driver coming into town in the other direction and the cop peered into our car as he waved us throught, apparently two girls in a loaded down car with Rhode Island plates wasn't what they were looking for, but they were sure looking for something or someone. About fifty yards up the road we saw the dead dog in the street, whether it was hit or shot (not so far fetched in Mississippi) or even related to what was going on I can't say. Alyssa says the dog was just hit by a car and unrelated and I was just projecting. Whatever, I guess thats why I blog and she takes the pictures.
A word about the road kill count, given the numbers I think its obvious why we're keeping it. 12 armadillos? 12, seriously? There are a lot of dead things in this part of the world, and they just kept piling up so we kept counting. I will say that I believe the watermelon fatality was unintentional, the others who knows? They do love to hunt down here, perhaps the do it with Dodge pickups as well as rifles and bows. We drove out of the depressing landscape of the Delta with its scrubby fields and kudzu invasion back into green hilly country, in this case the Ozarks. It was a long drive through mostly two lane roads rather than true highways which meant that the pace wasn't always as fast as I would have liked but overall nothing too extreme.
When I started to plan this trip and knew we would be visiting Mississippi to see friends I also realized this would necessitate driving through Arkansas, which frankly was not something I was jumping up and down celebrating. There is a great website for roadtrippers, roadsideamerica.com and I simply sat down and searched through Arkansas until I found an attraction to break up the trip. The magical attraction was the Christ of the Ozarks, aka the third largest statue of Jesus on the planet, and the largest in North America. Its located in the same complex as the Great Passion Play (which we did not see) and is free. Legend has it the reason Jesus doesn't have feet in this statue is because if he was any taller he would have had to have a blinking red light on his head so planes wouldn't hit him. The statue is large, though hardly majestic and certainly not very pretty. He's been patched up over the years so there are dirty streaks where the mortar doesn't match and his eyes are more than a little creepy. One critic descried the statue as a milk carton with a tennis ball on top. That perhaps is a bit harsh, I prefer the assessment that this is not a soft cuddly Jesus, but rather a stone cold ass kicking Jesus ready for a smackdown with Satan. That is an attraction worth driving to. Also a warning, should you visit the Christ of the Ozarks, apparently the speed limit on the road leading to it is 10 mph which a creepy older man with a dirty tee shirt and and incongruous fluffy white dog gleefully informed up as soon as we stepped out of the car. When we returned he continued to talk to us about how disappointed he was we hadn't brought the rain with us from Rhode Island. Luckily our doors have good stout locks, unfortunately in our haste to get away we never got to see the piece of the Berlin Wall thrown in the mix for good measure, just in case the world's third largest Jesus wasn't enough. Because of the extreme Arkansas heat and safety concerns Skarsgard had to remain in the confines of the car, luckily on our way out of Eureka Springs we had occasion to stop at the Bavaria Hotel and he made a new lady friend, Ingrid.
From there we briefly crossed into Missouri before reaching Kansas. Now I had been looking forward to Kansas for a number of reasons. Firstly its the geographical center of the country, secondly as Bill Bryson, my personal hero put it, Kansas is the quintessential American state. Its where Dorothy and Superman come from, it has farmland and small towns, good solid values and an all around wholesomeness hard to match anywhere. I also had been warned about how boring Kansas would be to drive through, which so far has been completely false. I was picturing something out of the Children of the Corn, even though that was set in Nebraska. Kansas is hillier than I imagined and very green, almost lush with plenty of trees. Now we have about five more hours of Kansas to go, so this isn't a final impression but so far its a good state.
Now a very favorable word about the Microtel In in Independence, for a chain hotel it is wonderful, clean and well appointed with a fantastic TV and lots of nice little extras for a very reasonable price. There is also a Wal-mart in the back parking lot, which I took a trip to involving a hike through a drainage culvert. Unfortunately in Kansas they don't sell alcohol on Sunday's so I simply stared into the beer case and drooled, but made up for it by buying fixings for sandwiches and lots of Rasinettes along with nailpolish and a Western romance novel (when in the West...)
